In Verdal, Norway, a hip-hop and street dance studio has become a place of trust, creativity and community for around 300 dancers. This case study, developed as part of the d@rts project, shares what students and founder Hulda Vestvick have to say about it – along with a short film made by local youth.
The Studio
Huldance is a hip hop and street dance studio in Verdal, in the Trøndelag region of Norway. Hulda Vestvick started the studio in February 2015 and now has around 300 students of all ages with a small team of teachers and assistant teachers. Alongside weekly classes, Hulda organises shows, battles and jams, and invites guest teachers from the wider hip hop scene.
The case and its methods
The case looks at how young people experience taking part in hip hop dance classes, and how hip hop culture is taught, lived and passed on in this setting. Fieldwork has included two semi-structured interviews with Hulda, focus group discussions with students, arts-based workshops with children and youth at the studio and follow-up co-validation workshops with students to share and build on preliminary findings. Kristie Mortimer, a New Zealand dance educator and researcher based in Norway, is working as a Postdoc at Nord University working on d@rts. Kristie has facilitated the case study and worked openly with the studio, including being a student herself in the adult hip hop classes.
Preliminary findings on dance, participation and belonging
From the case study, ideas around four areas have emerged: feeling safe and supported; creativity, play and fun; self-expression and growth; and belonging and community.
- Belonging and community was the dominant experience for students of all ages. Dance at Huldance is understood primarily as a collective, relational practice, and togetherness was named repeatedly and independently by participants. As one younger student put it, "I choose together because we dance together." An older student made the same point about the form itself: "each time you dance hip-hop or something, you need to be together."
- Feeling safe and supported underpins this. Trust, support and respect came up across the age groups, and students described them as conditions the group actively maintains rather than as by-products of dancing. One older student chose the word trust because "it's a very safe environment" and "they can trust each other to be there." Another chose support " because I feel lots of support from Hulda and the people you dance with."
- Self-expression and growth was more prominent among older students, who linked freedom and creative agency to their own development. One described dance as a way "to let my inner self out, the version of me that doesn't come out so often." A younger student chose freedom "because I feel free when I dance."
- Creativity, play and fun worked as genuine pedagogical drivers rather than only as motivators. Play lowered barriers to participation, and freestyle and improvisation gave students a sense of creative ownership: "I can do freestyle and I can do whatever I want when I dance." Joy and happiness were reported across all age groups — "when I dance, I just enjoy it, it makes me feel alive" — and even students who acknowledged physical tiredness named no significant negatives.
Sharing the work
Kristie and Hulda have been working together to share ideas from the case study. They facilitated a workshop at the BARN: Research on children and childhood in Nordic countries conference in Trondheim, titled Participatory arts-based research in practice: Movement, dialogue, and community with Huldance Dansestudio and the dialoguing@rts project. They have also begun work on an exposition for Research Catalogue, Belonging in Motion: A dialogical exploration of children’s participation and cultural literacy in a Norwegian hip hop dance studio, to appear in the Performing Participation – (Ethnographic) Perspectives on Dialogical Arts and Cultural Education volume. The studio’s involvement in the project has also been picked up by local outlet Tindved Kulturhage.
Words from Hulda: what has been happening at Huldance lately
A film by local youth
A short video documentary was made by Visjon UB, a student group from Levanger Videregående Skole, who filmed some of the workshops and spoke with Kristie, Hulda and students. It was shared on the d@rts and Huldance Instagram accounts, documenting the studio’s involvement with the project and its value in the community, and giving something back to Hulda and the studio.